-Forty years ago today, Salvador Allende's
democratically-elected government in Chile was overthrown by a
US-backed military coup.

Under Allende's administration, the people in Chile tried to
pursue their idea of a new kind of society: equal, free, and
justice for all. The US government, bent on undermining the
possibility of democratic socialism in its hemisphere, did its
best to destroy that idea with low-intensity warfare, political
and economic sabotage, and support for rightwing army leaders
that wanted to overthrow the government.

The brutal consequences of that coup remain one of the most
glaring examples of the inhumanity of imperialism and since the
violent overthrow remains a universal symbol of “anti-democracy
at its best,” as the recently deceased author and filmmaker Saul
Landau once put it, the anniversary should be taught and
remembered in the United States, which played a decisive covert
role in the events of forty years ago.

The footage is from a
documentary called:
The War on the Democracy from John Pilger, everyone should
take the time to see this great educational documentary.

Remembering Allende

His dual commitment to socialism and democracy ought to be a
model today.

By Marc Cooper

September 11,
2013 "Information
Clearing House - "The
Nation" -
It's enough to review once more that last, final black-and-white
photograph of Salvador Allende to glimpse the apparent
contradictions of his life and legacy on this, the thirtieth
anniversary of his death, and that of his Popular Unity
government.

Chilean Army tanks and troops were circling the presidential
palace, twin Air Force jets ready to bomb it were already in the
air and General Pinochet was about to seize power. Accompanied
by his young bodyguard, there on the palace doorstep stood the
65-year-old gentleman Allende, the medical doctor, veteran
parliamentarian and democratically elected president in
impeccably pressed pants and a silk tweed jacket over a
hand-knit sweater--with the strange, surreal accents of a steel
military helmet on his head and fully loaded AK-47 in his arms.
Of these last moments in the life of Allende, Gabriel García
Márquez wrote: "His greatest virtue was following through, but
fate could only grant him that rare and tragic greatness of
dying in armed defense of the whole moth-eaten paraphernalia of
an execrable system which he proposed abolishing without a
shot."

García Márquez captures a crucial truth, but one that is
partial. Allende is widely remembered only as a victim--of the
Chilean counterrevolution, of the vast US covert destabilization
program and ultimately of what some argue was his own peaceful
strategy. But his positive contributions to history, his bold
attempts to redefine the very concepts of revolution, socialism
and democracy, and the unique place that he deserves in the
annals of the international left remain substantially
unrecognized--or misunderstood. Even for a younger generation of
radicals, Allende is often but a distant memory, a footnote,
just one more entry, alongside Arbenz and Mossadegh, on a
laundry list of elected leaders violated by imperial arrogance.

Though most often characterized as the "first freely elected
Marxist head of state," who proposed a "peaceful transition to
socialism," Allende intended something more sweeping. His
insistence on the use of democratic means to achieve power and
radically reconstruct society was neither a mere tactic nor just
a euphemism for minor and moderate reform.

There was no precedent for what Allende was attempting--except
maybe in the writings of Marx. Socialism, real socialism, as
argued by the Old Lion, would bring with it an expansion and
deepening of democracy, not its curtailment or abolition.

Allende believed profoundly in this principle. He explicitly
rejected the model of European Socialists, who--even by
1970--aspired to be little more than the liberal face of
capitalist management. And though he considered himself a friend
and ally of Fidel Castro (especially in the face of US
hostility), Allende rejected any suggestion that Cuba or any of
the other Communist countries of the time could be a model for
his vision of socialism.

Allende saw a third way--in no way to be confused with Tony
Blair's self-declared middle path between corporate free markets
and social democracy, but rather an authentically socialist and
democratic alternative to meek social reform, on the one hand,
and authoritarian "people's democracies"--Stalinist
dictatorships--on the other.

So while Allende insisted on absolute respect for the law and
constitutional processes, on no restrictions on freedom of the
press, speech and assembly, he simultaneously carried out the
nationalization of Chile's copper mines and 200 major
corporations, a sweeping land reform that expropriated monopoly
holdings, and a host of other measures that benefited and
empowered the poor.

From the outset, Allende's position in its full complexity was
rarely understood by much of the left. When France's leading
revolutionary of the time, Régis Debray, came to Santiago to
depose Allende in now legendary and lengthy interviews, the
young Frenchman was manifestly confused. In Debray's rigid
thinking, either one was a bona fide armed revolutionary à la
Che Guevara or a hopeless reformer following in the footsteps of
the ineffectual European popular fronts of the 1930s. Allende
had to repeat to Debray several times that the new Chilean
government, coming to power democratically, would both respect
and enhance democracy while not shying away from radical,
socialist reform.

A few years after the coup, another high-profile European
leftist finally got it right regarding Allende. The Italian
Marxist philosopher Lucio Colletti (who died in 2001 after a
disappointing political journey to the right) argued back in the
mid-1970s that the left had bogged down in a false and perilous
assumption: i.e., the more violent a revolution, the more
transformative it must be. Consequently, peaceful
transitions--like Allende's Popular Unity government--were
doomed to dead-end reformism. Colletti argued that this facile
thinking was itself a legacy of Stalinism and, indeed, had no
real roots in socialist experience.

In the three decades since the coup, the criticism most
frequently raised on the left about Allende was that he failed
to "arm the workers" and that he was too tolerant of an
opposition that eventually overthrew him.

The first point is beyond absurdity. Guns don't materialize
either from the sky or from presidential decree. Chile's
relatively advanced and stable democratic institutions made the
option of armed revolt about as viable and attractive as it
might seem in modern California. If the argument is that Allende,
in the weeks before the coup, should have preventively armed his
supporters, the follow-up question should be, how? Just as
realistic--that is, unrealistic--is the suggestion that he
should have disarmed the military.

The Allende government made many strategic mistakes--enough that
a coup would probably have been inevitable even if the United
States had never engaged in its covert program of subversion
(though the American intervention certainly accelerated and
paved the way for the putsch). At times the Popular Unity
government I worked with was driven too much by a heady
voluntarism, a hubris that kept it from making key alliances and
compromises. At other moments, the government was paralyzed by
its own internal divisions and disagreements. But among these
mistakes was certainly not Allende's tolerance for the
opposition or his commitment, to the end, to democracy. I don't
know if historic circumstances would have ever permitted
Allende's vision to triumph. I do know that if he had suspended
democracy and ruled by dictatorship, it would no longer have
been his vision, nor would it any longer have been a
"revolution" much worth defending.

If one surveys the panorama of today's international left,
Allende's legacy occasionally flashes and flourishes. The
arduous two-decade march into power of Brazil's Workers' Party,
and the unique balancing act of socialist President Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva, draw directly from the lessons of Chile. The
anti-authoritarian, egalitarian spirit of new social movements--
whether in Buenos Aires or Seattle--reflects the ethos of
Allende, as do the recent moves by Argentine President Néstor
Kirchner to lift immunity from prosecution of officers of the
former military junta. Indeed, anywhere the left is willing to
be open, innovative, nondogmatic and imaginative, both realistic
and utopian, where it can reject Tony Blair's New Labour
alliance with Dubya's neocons as firmly and unflinchingly as it
denounces the wholesale jailing of dissidents and summary
executions by an ossified and dictatorial Cuban state, the
figure of Salvador Allende and his self-sacrifice for the
principles of social justice and democracy loom ever larger,
more inspiring and more worthy of reverence and respect.

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